IndyCar will not see Mexico City's Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez added to its 2026 schedule, the series announced Saturday, citing “significant impact of next year's World Cup.”

One month ago, a Penske Entertainment executive told IndyStar that series leadership was “very confident we'll race in Mexico in 2026,” at a time when conversations around the prospect of American open-wheel racing returning to the country for the first time since 2007 were said to be ongoing and “very positive.”

It's not clear what changed within the last four weeks that starkly shifted those conversations. IndyStar has sought additional clarity from series officials as to why ultimately a race in Mexico City — a target of IndyCar ownership for a decade or more — has again fallen through for 2026. When reached Saturday following the release of the news, a Penske Entertainment official pointed IndyStar to the news release and provided no further perspective.

“For more than a year, we have been working diligently to bring the IndyCar series to Mexico City's Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. While extensive progress was made alongside the venue's operation group and our potential promoter, ultimately the significant impact of next year's World Cup proved too challenging to ensure a successful event, given the available summer dates,” Penske Entertainment Corp. president and CEO Mark Miles said. “While we absolutely want to race in Mexico, we also want to ensure everyone involved feels the conditions are in place to plan a world-class and highly engaging race weekend.

“We will keep working to bring our racing to Mexico and hope for an event to be on the schedule as soon as the right opportunity presents itself.”

Mexico City and its Estadio Azteca stadium is set to be one of 16 cities and venues set to host the largest men's FIFA World Cup tournament in the event's history, stretching across six weeks with 48 teams spread across three host countries (Canada, the United States and Mexico). Estadio Azteca will host the kickoff match for the tournament June 11, and its last match — one in the Round of 16 — will take place July 5. Unlike Toronto's historic IndyCar street race, the track layout for which runs right next to Toronto's host stadium (BMO Field) and requires significant track building and teardown, Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez is a permanent track that would require little significant venue preparation to host such a race.

According to sources directly involved with discussions around the prospect of IndyCar returning to Mexico City, there was concern around hosting a race in the city before the tournament's completion, given how much of the country's sports-crazed fans would likely to be focused in on the World Cup, as well as the prosect of the Mexican national team winning its way deep into the tournament, which is scheduled for a championship match July 19.

The inability to host a race there from mid-June to late-July, combined with May being fully occupied and the track's decision to scrap any shot of hosting a late-March or early April race significantly limited the open windows for Penske Entertainment and its planned promoter, well-known local marketer and businessman Ricardo Escotto, to target a potential race — particularly when considering the other races that would expect to be held between late July and early September, including Laguna Seca, Portland, the revamped Canadian street race in Markham, the Milwaukee Mile and Nashville Superspeedway.

Those slim scheduling options, combined with significant rises to the track organizer's requested rental fee from the race's promotion group and that group being taken over even more by Liberty Media, seem to have paved the way for an event that, despite increased discussions — prompted in many ways due to the bad look of getting beaten to the track by NASCAR — could never clear the years' worth of hurdles it has always faced.

“No one wants a race in Mexico more than me,” Pato O'Ward, IndyCar's most popular driver and a native of Monterrey, Mexico, said. “But we want to create an incredible event that is built to last. That requires the right date and the right year for fans and sponsors to fully get behind our sport. I'm motivated to carry this effort forward and take part in a future race in my home country.”

Series leadership was lambasted by both its drivers and fans just over a year ago after the news of NASCAR landing a race at the Mexico City track. Chatter on the topic turned into a multi-day news cycle that featured a back-and-forth between O'Ward and Miles and ultimately led to a revealing status check as to where the series had been and was in its nearly decade-long push to return to the city that had did not bear fruit. Miles told reporters that weekend that he had been involved in ongoing dialogue with the track operators, but that their general view was that the sport wasn't nearly big enough to necessitate them sticking their neck out to host and promote a race as it had done for years for Formula 1 and as it would do in 2025 for NASCAR.

Miles noted that he'd been given the opportunity to rent the track, but that it would've meant IndyCar needing to find its own promoter to pump up the race while not nearly having the backing of the track's owners and operators themselves. Miles pledged to be willing to wait until he could secure a multi-year deal with on-the-ground support before taking the series back to Mexico City.

“I think the way (Penske Entertainment) does things isn't with urgency. And at some point, I get it. If you're too impatient, you could end up being too antsy, but the series has moved too slowly, and that's the reality,” O'Ward said a year ago of IndyCar's inability to land a race in his home country. “The series is healthy, and there's a lot of people who want to join. Everybody's saving a bunch of money because we're racing with a car that's more than a decade old. You'd at least want to see that we're getting somewhere.”

At that point, O'Ward had seemed to comfortably be IndyCar's most popular driver for more than a year and had challenged prominently for both an IndyCar title and Indy 500 victories. His fellow drivers took issue that wekeend at the Milwaukee Mile that Penske Entertainment officials had not done enough, they said, to piggyback off his popularity and own work the Mexican driver had done to build his brand.

“Everybody's overtaking us left-right, left-right. It's like, 'Come on,'” Alex Palou said a year ago. “100% we should've been there. I mean, I know it's tough. I know it's not an easy move, but I think we knew Pato was a big thing in 2021 when he was battling for the championship. He's been growing, so we're like five years too late, and now NASCAR overtakes us.”

Added his Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Scott Dixon at the time: “I think that's a massive miss. I don't know how that happens.”

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCare schedule news: No Mexico City race in 2026, Pato O'Ward reaction